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Thursday, April 11, 2013

When Weather Impacts Running...or When It Doesn't

When it comes to foul weather, runners seem to fall into two distinct camps. You have your runner who would argue that since you can't know the weather come race day, you might as well suck it up and run in all weather types in training. The other camp, however, would argue why suffer through a bad training run, possibly making yourself sick?

I can see both sides of the argument and consider myself falling somewhere in the middle. While I used to avoid runs in the rain or snow, a group run outside with friends in sleeting rain a couple of years ago cured me of my need to have fair weather while running. I guess I figured if I could survive those conditions, I could survive anything. Now, if need be, I can run in the rain, snow, slush, or heat (not that it seems we'll ever see any of that again in Wisconsin....longest winter ever...), but I don't necessarily seek it out. In fact, as I have become more relaxed about running - and more adept at juggling my training plan - I do tend to look more for fair weather windows and plug my running into them.

However, I know there are others out there who would most likely run even if hail were falling from the sky or blizzard conditions had visibility down to zero, and that's why, when the venue for yesterday's monthly fun run for our running club emailed to say they had lost power and most likely would have to cancel our event last night, I almost panicked. All I could think of was that other fun run cancelation we had several years ago (because of a blizzard, by the way) and remembering the shit that we got over it.

If you recall, the weather looked something like this for most of yesterday...

But some people will run in anything, so that is why when a new venue was found it seemed like a good idea to keep the run on, and I am glad we did.

As predicted, despite the icy conditions and the threat of more precipitation, we still had almost 50 people show up for the fun run. Driving over to the run and watching the ice fall from the trees and power lines, seeing all the downed trees and taped off roads because of them, and watching raindrops hit my windshield, I could only shake my head at the tenacity of my fellow runners.

And I smiled, because I am happy to consider myself one of their ranks, knowing that if I didn't have to volunteer at the fun run I would have been out there with them, following the route map given to me, dodging falling ice, and scanning the road for icy spots.

2 comments:

I used to be a fair weather runner, but once I quit the gym I learned that I can run and have a great time in nearly all kinds of weather except of course I don't try thunderstorms, or tornados, etc and I hate HOT weather.